New beer in wine bottles: NVIDIA to rebrand G80 as supercomputer chip

Rumor has it that NVIDIA will start a new branding effort for the G80 aimed at …

If you've been following my coverage of the high performance computing (HPC) market—especially my coverage of the emerging market for commodity data-parallel coprocessors that are repurposed for use in HPC clusters—then know this: NVIDIA hates my line on all this stuff, and they haven't been shy about letting me know it. Now, I reveal this not in order to be catty, but to provide some context for a new rumor (courtesy of The Street) that NVIDIA will soon launch a separate "GPU computing" brand dedicated to selling the G80 to businesses as a general-purpose data-parallel coprocessor. Knowing that NVIDIA dislikes my GPU-as-coprocessor coverage, and knowing what they don't like about it, is key to understanding why they're launching a whole separate brand and product line around an existing GPU part.

First, let's contrast my typical take on the GPU in general, whether from AMD/ATI or NVIDIA, as a data-parallel coprocessor with the message that NVIDIA has been trying to attach to the G80 via their CUDA initiative:

Me: Anybody's GPU, whether it's from NVIDIA or AMD/ATI, is a big, hot, power-hungry, beast of a coprocessor that's designed to do one thing extremely well: real-time 3D rendering for games. In fact, we can be even more specific and call a GPU a "Microsoft DirectX toaster." These same DirectX toasters also just happen to offer significant speedups vs. a regular microprocessor for certain types of data-parallel workloads that are important in HPC.

(Please note for the record that the line above is my own characterization of NVIDIA's G80 message, and not a quote or paraphrase of any NVIDIA spokesperson or any company literature.)

As you can see, NVIDIA and I have conflicting takes on the G80 as a data-parallel coprocessor. We can both agree that it's the most desirable 3D gaming card on the market right now, and that it's also much faster than a general-purpose CPU for some types of supercomputing applications, but we're at loggerheads over what the GPU truly is first and foremost. Is it a DirectX toaster that can be coaxed into doing other stuff, but at a price in wattage, programmer time, vendor lock-in, and potential cross-generational compatibility (see this article for a discussion of these issues)? Or, is it a natural-born supercomputer-on-a-chip that has finally, after long years of honing its chops in the gaming market, found its true calling in the area of high-performance computing?

From my perspective, as someone who's convinced of the appropriateness of his way of characterizing the HPC prospects of the G80 in specific and the GPU in general, NVIDIA has a message problem. They have a floor wax that happens to taste pretty good, so they're trying to use it to break into the food business by marketing it as a dessert topping. But unlike the target demographic for New Shimmer, the customer base for DirectX toasters is quite different from the customer base for general-purpose data-parallel coprocessors, though the two groups do have some overlapping (but by no means completely identical) computational needs. This is why it makes perfect sense for NVIDIA to completely rebrand the G80 and devote an entirely separate marketing effort to selling it in the HPC space.

With a new brand and a new line of memory-heavy, HPC-specific add-in boards, the company can focus strictly on the G80's HPC potential while simultaneously minimizing all of the graphics-specific hardware baggage that the device carries from its origins in the gaming market. Furthermore, this tactic is probably going to work, because right now there isn't a coprocessor that can beat the G80 in in terms of performance per watt and flexibility while coming even close to it in price. Or, to adapt a common adage to the high-performance computing market: performance, low power, flexibility, price; pick any three. The combinations that you can get out of these factors will point you to either a multicore CPU, a GPU, Cell, or something like the Clearspeed chip.